by Avatar PressAvatar Press has announced that the characters that Garth Ennis calls his favorites of any he's ever created or written come back for more when Ennis and John McCrea resurrect their irreverent pair of private eyes, Dougie and Ivor, for Dicks 2. An all new, self-contained series written by Ennis and drawn by McCrea, Dicks 2 issue 1 is scheduled for release in September 2002 from Avatar Press.

"I never forgot Dougie and Ivor, not once, not even with all the Preachers and Hitmans and Punishers and all the other stuff I've been doing down the years," says award-winning writer Garth Ennis. "They remain my all-time favorites of the characters I've written or created-- my pride and joy, the ongoing saga of two idiots from Belfast, by two idiots from Belfast."

"If the streets are paved with gold, this is the shit on the sidewalk," agrees John McCrea's mum. John himself was not immediately available for comment as he was too embarrassed.

"If the early reaction to this new material is any indication, Dicks is destined to take its place alongside Preacher as one of Garth's most notorious works," laughs Avatar editor in chief William Christensen. "A preview of the cover art of issue 1 alone created a minor scandal at the Bristol convention earlier this year, not to mention the promotional custom-printed Dicks condoms that McCrea gleefully handed out at the convention-- those will be available with a retailer incentive offer, incidentally. But on a more serious note, I'm just pleased that Avatar is playing a part in getting the continuing adventures of Garth and John's favorite creator-owned characters out to their fans with this brand new, stand-alone epic."

As Ennis implied above, this new beginning for the Dicks has been a long time in the making-- over a decade, in fact. Dicks protagonists Dougie and Ivor first appeared and began to take shape in Troubled Souls, a story first serialized in seminal British anthology Crisis in early 1989, putting it among the earliest professional works of both creators. Dougie and Ivor's antics took center stage in the 1990 sequel titled For a Few Troubles More. The first actual Dicks series appeared in 1996 and was brought back into print with new material by Avatar as Bigger Dicks in early 2002. Dicks 2 will feature all new material in a self-contained, new-reader-friendly saga of the further adventures of Dougie and Ivor.